I don’t think Parasite was even available as a dub.
I have a suspicion that the prevalence of fansubbed anime over the last 10–20 years has been gradually priming youth in the West for subtitled entertainment, and that it’s the pre-anime generation (eg. 40+) who are less used to it.
I’ve lately come around to voice over original since I like the effect in the kabuki videos I’ve been watching. However, that’s not actually a dub, per se… there’s a single “narrator” and he provides context, introduces the actors, summarises speech and so forth.
So, instead of “I wanna catch 'em all!” being dubbed on top of whatever Ash is saying, you’d hear something like “Ash is excited – he wants to catch all of the Pokemon.” and the energy would be largely left in the source audio.
I encountered an odd word today: the Spanish zorro / zorra, “fox”.
It doesn’t descend from Latin, which has volpes / vulpes / vulpis, and appears in the 15th century. I’d guess it displaced a native word volp, like that in Catalan.
Wiktionary gives five possible etymologies:
from pre-Latin Iberian substrate (so Celtic?)
from Gothic (thus Germanic) fauho
from a Somrai (Chadian) word describing the fox’s colour
from Basque azari / azeri
onomatopoeic
One resource speculates that azari derives from a Basque personal name Azari, from the Latin Asenarius, saying that “the use of personal names to denote ‘fox’ is well attested in Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance.”
According to Anki either today or tomorrow will be exactly 6 months since I started this run. I celebrated it by finally going through all my review debt.
Hoshishita is a Japanese term that refers to the third-line points directly under the side star points. They are marked in the diagram by the letters A to D.
Intuitive enough in simple cases but as sentences get longer, and you get more abstract terms, plurals, it becomes less and less clear. And since a lot of sentences don’t feel that unnatural without articles, it’s easy to lose them.
Calligraphy by Fujisawa Shuko of 磊, gifted to Antti in Japan in 2012 by Fujisawa’s student Mimura, to whom Antti had been introduced by Kobayashi Chizu.
He said in his blog post that he intended to have it framed in Finland.
The caption:
This piece of calligraphy reads 磊, which consists of the character 石, stone, included three times. The resulting meaning is not surprisingly “many stones”. It’s a very rare character, possibly used in expressions like 磊落, open-hearted; 磊々落々, unaffected; and 豪放磊落, broadminded.
I happened to run into Turkish youtube contents when looking for instructions on how to fret a baglama.
It’s a pretty Turkish thing and I learned a few words in Turkish that were related to that topic.
I had to use them to refine my search and it was quite surprising to suddenly see only Turkish language results in my search page.
Similarly I tried sometimes to use Japanese words copied and pasted (as I can’t absolutely speak Japanese) and was amazed by the amount of results that I didn’t even touch before.
One of them was a fantastic channel about traditional Japanese handcrafts: paper, fabric, colours, pottery, prints and many others. I watched all their videos even though I couldn’t understand a word!
What I really can’t stand is automatic translation of titles and subtitles. I had to change my country in youtube settings just to avoid silly translation for the English contents that I usually follow.
So now I am English just for youtube.
Just something interesting I thought about while trying to wrap my head around the recent discussion about the word “oriental”, the following are all etymologically synonymous:
I realized a big advantage of Japanese/Chinese and the like. Table headings. It’s a problem I struggled with all my life. You could have a nice thin column but the heading is so verbose and annoying and you try to squish it somehow. In something like Japanese it could be expressed in a few kanji characters and be really compact, and even if not, they are officially allowed to write vertically, aren’t they?
That’s hilarious!
I can even understand a lot of it. But it’s probably much funnier when you are a native speaker of one Slavic language and also have some experience with at least one other.
But it’s probably much funnier when you are a native speaker of one Slavic language and also have some experience with at least one other.